ORLANDO, Fla.—With the demise of Comdex, the most important fall trade show for the enterprise may be Gartner Inc.s Symposium/ITxpo taking place here this week.

Gartner expects more than 6,500 attendees at the trade show for high-level IT managers, CIOs and CEOs. It will include almost 200 exhibitors and numerous panels on issues of concern for the upper management of enterprise IT.

The shows highlights will be its keynote speeches by some of ITs heavy hitters, including Cisco Systems Inc.s John Chambers, Intel Corp.s Craig Barrett, Microsoft Corp.s Steve Ballmer and Sun Microsystems Inc.s Scott McNealy.

Unlike most trade shows, the vendors on the show floor are not so much focusing on new products as they are on showing businesss top brass that their products and services have what it takes to deliver the IT goods.

Despite Gartners high-end market, the show also has several vendors and products, such as SAP AG with its Solutions for Small and Midsize Business, aimed at the increasingly important SMB (small and midsized business) market.

The heart of this, like any Gartner show, is its conference sessions run by the firms analysts. At these sessions, analysts will give attendees their thoughts on such subjects as outsourcing, the future of open source, the state of RFID and the best ways to deploy wireless technologies. The focus of these seminars is on the business side of such questions rather than the technology side.

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